


unheimlich: fragments

by shilu_ette



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-02
Updated: 2016-07-02
Packaged: 2018-07-19 16:24:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7369042
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shilu_ette/pseuds/shilu_ette
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tsukikage. Tsukishima Kei runs away to Berlin rather than facing his past and his relationship with Kageyama. Kageyama chases after him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	unheimlich: fragments

Unheimlich.

 

The man almost barks out the word in his native tongue. It must come off as a surprise, because he even stops to crush out his smoke as his deft fingers flip over the dark photos. These are uncanny, he exclaims again, in his broken English, a smile adorning his face. It is a strange look; with his stiff coat and slicked hair, he does not look like a person to show happiness. Kei watches the man admire his latest works, the pictures that only hold light and shadow.

 

Are you a photographer?

 

The man asks this almost confidently, predicting his answer. Ja, Kei might say, and they will from hereon start a conversation about photos and art, and Kei will be drunk enough to allow the man to escort him back to a shabby motel and they might fuck, and the man may mutter, uncanny, this is surreal, just like your photos. Kei might ask him for a smoke and the room would be filled with the bitter smell of ash and sweat. They might meet again. Kei shakes his head.

 

Nein, he murmurs, I played volleyball. He takes the photos away from the man’s grip, a gentle refusal, and stuffs them back into his bag. The man is confused now; he wrinkles his nose as if he smelt something unpleasant.

 

Volleyball?

 

The man repeats the word slowly. He must not understand, Kei thinks. And for a moment, neither can he, because: that old memory, that old label. It was only for fun, he wanted to explain. It was only a club activity. But the word had just slipped out of his tongue, so casually, as if the sport dared to define him to this stranger who was only interested in his strange photographs. It was nothing; it should have been nothing.

 

He had come to this foreign and cold country to prove to himself that this was so.

 

.

.

.

 

I don’t understand you.

 

This was one of your favorite sayings, with your scrunched up face and your pouting mouth. You growled your pettiness at me while I pinned you down in bed and smirked down at your expression, and we fucked all morning because you did not understand why I mocked and teased you so cruelly. We fought often and most of them ended with shouting and you daring to hit me and I daring to hurt you and us daring to toss all arguments aside in place for sex. You would gasp, _why are you so difficult_ , a low growling that rang inside my ears, and for you I could not provide an answer.

 

In Berlin, Kei holds imagined conversations with a shadow, as he looks out the window of his small room that he had rented, smoking stick after stick of cigarettes. His fingers are now yellow stained and dirty. The sky here is grey and the wind is chilly and the city is lonely. You might like it here, majesty, Kei thinks wearily, or then again, perhaps you may not. You had liked still and balmy nights when it was good for a midnight run, you liked our quiet and calm countryside town where nothing ever happened. You liked simple things: volleyball, curry, and victory. You professed you liked me too, although I denied this.

 

The letter in his mind ends there. Kei sighs, and inhales. Another winter has passed in his city. A letter arrives from home. His brother writes to him: when are you coming home? It is a plea and a demand. He does not write back.

 

He has come here to disappear. What good was it, if a ghost could write back home? I will be a shadow, he had thought, riding out the one-way plane to Germany. I will become a ghost and leave everything behind. I will not return. This was a promise; for whom, Kei did not know.

 

.

.

.

 

Everything was easier when they donned their uniforms and played within a space of a small court. They jostled each other in the locker rooms with fake scowls as Hinata and Yamaguchi whispered in the background, and on the way home they would hook their fingers tentatively until one of them started a fight. He wore Kei’s headphones and Kei watched him hum a favorite song off-tune. He had always been shorter than Kei, and this allowed Kei to see his rounded head bobbing along with the beat. They inhaled the thick summer heat and heard the insects buzz. They kissed in small alleyways or even in broad daylight in the middle of the street, where no one ever disturbed them, because the town was so quiet and peaceful. Summer nights when they walked back home after practice and he would be alit with the prospect of the upcoming tournaments in the fall. Kei sometimes wishing how there was a camera. Because the setting was perfect, the boy was exhilarating, and Kei was in love. This was how one captured and distilled a memory—this was the moment that Kei would come back to, time and time again. They were young and they had nothing to fear. He would close his eyes when Kei leaned down. His lips were dry and chapped. The bolder of the two, he would laugh and bring their heads even closer. His happiness was honest and open. It had always been so. Kei was the quieter one, for he thought and fretted ahead. The future was uncertain; only Kei understood this completely.

 

.

.

.

 

The name is unspoken in his conscious mind. But sometimes Kei becomes drunk and he roams around the pallid city and watches the cold and foreign people pass him by, and he thinks involuntarily to himself, I wonder if you would have come here with me, Kageyama. He immediately berates himself for his fallacy. His emotions are fragile and taut, as he holds up his camera lens and snaps photos of people and desolate buildings and rainy skies. These are new collections, there are pictures of living and man-made creations. He is roaming over Germany in search of something. He is creating something to fill out a hollow place in his heart.

 

Kageyama is only a memory now, and he expands and overtakes Kei’s mind. Kei imagines him only as a younger boy, when he would roll the ball around his fingers and hit a sharp serve across the net. This is how he will always remember the boy; over and over again he replays the scene inside is mind, as Kageyama would toss the ball high in the air and smack down the ball with great speed and power. How he would look dazed at his own genius, although he would always deny this. The happiness in his face that shone, radiant. The sweat trickling down his face.

Kageyama had said something once. _The only time I would ever despair is when I am unable to play volleyball._ He said this without any self-inflated egoism, as if he was truly unable to fathom a future without a ball and a net. Arrogance had once destroyed him back in middle school, but somehow his majesty managed to overcome such obstacles time and time again. He had experiences loneliness and despair when no one was willing to hit his tosses, and yet here Kageyama was, once again inside a court and professing his obsession over a sport that had once ruined Akiteru’s life and pride. Kei watched him, this prodigal boy that his brother never could have been. He would never taste failure, Kei thought, he was too talented for that. Kei was never keen to take chances and Kageyama, bright and shining as he was, offered him a sense of euphoria that Kei had never thought he was capable of thinking. The beat of his heart, how strange it was after all those years.

 

.

.

.

 

His first taste of failure. When he had met his brother’s eyes across the bleachers, his brother had held not a ball but pathetic plastic cone to cheer on his team as the crowd shouted loudly for another ace that was playing in the court. Their eyes met and his brother gave him a look of such abstract horror that Kei was almost willing to feel sorry for him. But no; he was too repulsed for that. You lied to me, he thought, you betrayed me. It was an empty feeling, and for a long time Kei did not know how to cope with the void inside him, festering away.

 

But here he could defend himself: he was young, and in those days Akiteru had been his world. At a young age he had watched it crumble away and this fear and repulsion he felt was fully justified. What he could not explain, even to himself, was the after that would come, even after he had experienced this feeling of desolation, how he still managed to feel the same terror and agony when he should have known better. He had tasted loss before. How then, may he understand Kageyama?

.

.

.

 

In our cold and small room, we often huddled inside the bedcovers and I kissed down your spine, pressing down your back and worrying the soft skin with my teeth while you gasped and fisted the sheets. That was our silence and peace; those winter nights when it was too cold to play volleyball and too windy to jog out, you would never get out of bed and stay as a languid body, pliable and soft. I would kiss you and cover your body with bruises but I did not speak out my thoughts. We were young and you were promising. You held everything at the tips of your fingertips; you were about to be a representative for Japan and sign your first contract. You were barely out of high school and already the media was clamoring to interview you, the boy from Miyagi whose tosses were precise on the verge of perfection. This was whom I loved, a boy who would die for this sport, who was the most dazzling as he stood on court.

 

The suddenness was what took him by surprise. Like a movie, Kei thought, just like all those years ago.

.

.

.

 

Kei, once in a letter written hastily during the first weeks in Berlin, Kei, you are a coward. His brother wrote him that and he did not bother to reply, then or after.

 

And so he was. But to defend himself, he did not ask to be involved in emotional turmoil that would stabilize his life routine. Life with Kageyama was full of those. It was something that he thought he could handle, the wave of intensity that threatened to drown him. Sometimes he looked at his once-teammate and he would be swept up with an instinctive urge to blurt out, I love you, I wish we would spend our lives together. He did not say those words bubbling inside his chest. And yet other times Kageyama would say, as if he did not understand, I love you, don’t you? He said them with such ease and a certain naïve confusion that was endearing. He treated love so simply. Like a budding springtime leaf, full of clear skies and rays of sunlight.

 

His love was circular and round, like the world that moved beneath them.

 

That was not how Kei acknowledged the burn inside his heart. He opened his mouth but he could not answer back.

 

.

.

.

 

Accident, the doctor said forlornly. He hung his head and shrugged a little with a grimace, and that was the end of his condolences. I’m sorry, I don’t think he would be able to play volleyball again. It is a miracle that he could walk, the doctor adds, as if that should make up for everything that has happened so far—be thankful for small miracles. Kei heard this with an empty mind.

 

Kei sat in the hospital ward, holding the pale and still hand pressing his lips to it, whispering verses of prayers that he did not believe in. But Kageyama would not be able to hit a jump serve again. He would only be able to walk and enjoy a life that was banal and nothing like what Kageyama had ever faced. The words wove through his head—if I despair, it is only when I am unable to stand in a court—that resolute, firm voice. I cannot see you despair, Kei thought fervently, I do not think I can bear to.

 

When the prayers did not work, he did not try to persevere the pain. He left the ward and trudged the long way back to their home, and in the darkness he clasped his hands and thought. The empty room did not offer him any answers. He was suffocating. Kageyama was unconscious, and then, what then? He had never been the one to stand resolutely and face against all odds. Kageyama would have understood. This was what Kei excused himself with as he boarded the plane with a small suitcase and a camera. The first picture he took was the grey sky that draped across Berlin, the frosty air that nipped at his nose.

 

.

.

.

 

In the Black Forest. Kei drove.

 

The road twisted and swerved. The trees mocked him; desolate without their leaves, they unnerved him in their closeness and thickness, as Kei dared to venture further and further into the forest grounds. At night, the braches let out a shrilling cry into the air, and Kei huddled in the backseat of the car, cramped and hungry, fiddling with his camera. He was waiting for the sun to rise. The forest was pitch dark; no moonlight filtered through the ground.

 

Unheimlich, or the Uncanny, as Freud pointed out, was human nature’s instinctive fascination and repulsion regarding death. We do not know what happens after we die; or, we profess we know the answers in our logical and arrogant mind. As soon as we encounter something that attempts to subvert our familiar world, we experience the strange sensation that we must self-preserve against it—or to tread carefully towards the unknown.

 

What a farce, Kei thought, doodling in the lecture, even as he attempted to mouth the unfamiliar German words along with the rest of the class. For the human mind is nothing if not controllable, instincts are nothing if not repressed, and Kei was nothing without his logic.

 

Somewhere a low hiss echoed. A howl rang into the sky. Kei leaned against the locked car door, feeling tired and bereft. I must capture the light and shadow. This was the only desire he had. Why, he did not know. He only knew that it would provide the answers to something he could not name.

 

.

.

.

 

In Berlin, he begins to take pictures of the desolate city, dead trees and abandoned train stations, the blazing purple sky. He stuffs his little room with winter clothes, for the winter here was nothing like the soft snowy pathways in Tokyo. Your bones might give you a chill. His landlady says gruffly, handing him a receipt of his month’s rent, along with a tattered muffler. You best get prepared. She looks at him suspiciously, measuring up his thin form. You should eat more. I’ve seen you tinkering about with a camera about. Are you a photographer?

 

He smiles tiredly and does not answer he question. He only thanks her politely, waits for his next batch of roll to dry.

 

.

.

.

 

Berlin is an ugly city, full of concrete slabs and kitsch-like buildings adorning the touristic places. Yet if Kei crosses down quiet alleyways, he could encounter small pubs and good food, her could perhaps take a stroll down at Tiergarten. He takes his camera everywhere with him.

 

And it was at a bench, somewhere inside that massive garden where royalty used to hunt for sport, that he meets the boy whom he had once mocked with a silly title.

 

“Tsukishima.”

 

He looks up.

 

Kageyama older.

 

Kageyama hobbling towards him.

 

Kageyama bracing himself against a crutch.

 

.

.

.

 

Kei blinks. His mind is blank but his mouth forms the words so naturally as if the time gap had never existed between them.

 

“Majesty,” he says. Hello, it’s been awhile, let’s pretend that I have not disappeared without a warning and this came about as a pleasant surprise.

 

The old title conveyed all this, or it surely must have, because Kageyama is standing there with a strange look on his face, as if he did not know whether to cry or laugh. His legs are shaking, and Kei is not cruel enough to let him continue to suffer like an idiot. He shifts his camera bag and motions the other man to sit. Kageyama, after a brief hesitation, obliges him. They are engulfed in a strange silence.

 

How are you, Kageyama does not ask.

 

How is your leg, Kei does not return.

 

Instead they watch a small group of children chase down a ball, their rough laughter echoing in the cold air. The bench seat is cold, but Kei does not bother getting up and walking away. Kageyama does not scream at him; that itself is good enough for him.

 

It is, in the end, always Kageyama who relents.

 

“Did you eat?”

 

First words. Kei looks at him, befuddled and then amused, a smirk blossoming up across his face. The motion is awkward; he had forgotten how to fall back into natural habits.

 

“Are you asking me to lunch?” Kei asks.

 

Kageyama makes a face of disgust and resignation. He sighs a little. “If you put it like that,” he replies tersely. He is still looking in front of him, and Kei observes him from the side; Kageyama’s grey-blue eyes and his sharp chin, his parched skin. Kageyama is only interested in following the children play ball with his eyes. 

 

“I know a good place,” Kei says, and picks up his camera. It is only here that he notices he hands are shaking. “Come with me.”

 

He stands up, and does not wait for Kageyama to follow.

 

.

.

.

 

They go to a small restaurant and Kei carefully slices up the hot slab of meat and sour bread in front of them while Kageyama silently looks on. In the dim light, Kageyama has aged, and he taps his fingers against the counter as he nervously sips his cup of water. Would you like a glass of beer, Kei asks politely. Kageyama jerks his head in irritation.

 

They begin to poke at their food. Kei does not eat much, on principle, but he has never known Kageyama to pass up on food. But the other man only looks down at his plate with a little frown, tinkering with his fork without much appetite.

“German food isn’t that bad, you know,” Kei observes, keeping his voice light. At this, Kageyama’s head jerks up.

 

“What?” he snaps. He does not understand the joke. They were not people who sat down at a table and had pleasant conversation; they were people who bit and tore at each other with words and mumbles apologies against the warm flesh of skin. They only began to perceive each other because of some stupid club activity years ago, a memory that was a foreign now to Kei as this city was. Kei looks down at his food. He makes a small face. This was a mistake, he thinks, disgusted. It was on a whim that he was here in the first place. He should have run away the moment he saw Kageyama. He fared better off as a shadow within Kei’s mind.

 

“What do you do nowadays?” This time it is Kageyama who asks. He looks at the bag besides Kei and frowns a little. “What are you doing with a camera?”

 

“What _does_ one do with a camera?” Kei replies back dryly, and Kageyama’s face morphs into an irritated scowl.

 

“Forget I asked,” he says, terse, and goes back to violently attacking his piece of meat. Kei sighs a little and leans back against his chair. Kageyama is finally eating, his cheek protruding due to the huge slice that he has managed to bite off. There is a bit of sauce on the side of his mouth. Kei is annoyed that he finds it endearing.

 

“Don’t be like that,” Kei says, hopefully in a cajoling manner. He rummages inside his bag and takes out a batch of photos that he hands over to Kageyama. “Here, see for yourself.” It is the same set of photos that he had shown the German man the night before. The pictures are full of nothingness, of abandonment, of gloominess. Kageyama flips through them slowly, his eyes narrowing in concentration while Kei sips his bitter coffee. He does not have the same reverence that the German had exclaimed over. But then again, Kei thinks, he does not understand what _unheimlich_ would be. Kageyama does not fear the unknown—or at least, the Kageyama that Kei had left behind.

 

Kageyama looks up.

 

“You’re missing something in them,” he says slowly, and Kei meets those eyes, calm and silent. Years passed between them; it is only now that Kei fully grasps this fact, as he stares into those eyes and cannot read anything out of them. His breath momentarily stops. “You…you’re looking for something.”

 

Kei lets out a small breath. He needs a smoke. “Am I,” he says lightly, “What would that be?”

 

The blank look is gone. Kageyama huffs in irritation. “Never mind, forget that I ever said anything.”

 

Fascination and repulsion. It is our primitive reaction of death. What does death convey? It is the void within us, the gap between our constrained realities and the unfamiliar situation we have placed ourselves in.

 

Kei finishes his cup of coffee. He motions to Kageyama. “Do you have time?” he asks. “Maybe you could model for me.”

 

.

.

.

 

 

Kei does not ask what Kageyama is doing in Berlin. Instead he asks whether Kageyama is free enough to not indulge in touristic whims. Kageyama does not asks why Kei ran away. Instead he mutters about how cold and unfriendly Kei’s small studio room is, glancing about while supporting himself on the crutches.

 

“I’m still going to the hospital,” he says, “Rehabilitation.” He says this without accusation. He does not shout, you left me there, you abandoned me without a note, you deserted me. His eyes do not condemn Kei. It is as if they had never been anything together in the first place, and therefore he did not expect Kei to meet any sort of expectations.

 

Kei sets up his camera without a reply. He cannot think of one.  He himself could not explain the sharp throb inside his heart.

 

.

.

.

 

Kageyama sits and poses. He lies still. Kei takes shot after shot, his mind whirling. He is like a man possessed when he clicks the shutter. He forgets who Kageyama is, where they are, as he snaps that Kageyama must stay still, and stop fidgeting around. He takes apart Kageyama’s body; he clicks a shot of those hands, eyes, neckline, an arm. He does not take a full shot of Kageyama. What lies in front of me is an object, Kei says to himself.

 

When he is finished, they look over the photos silently, and the photos each show a body part of Kageyama. Only the eyes show whom Kei had mangled; the rest, they could be any person, really, Kei thinks. Just a distorted and fragmented body. He is almost proud. They mean something to him, the bodily parts in the photograph. Kageyama, surprisingly, laughs a little.

 

“I don’t get you,” he says. He says this as if this was a joke. “I don’t know what you want, I don’t even know what you’re doing here.” He is saying this in a resigned voice. He is surrendering.

 

Was there anything left to surrender?

 

Kei turns to look at him slowly. He bites his tongue to ward off any instinctive words. He says slowly, “What were you expecting?”

 

Kageyama does not meet his eye. He is still looking at the photographs, his mouth curved in an ironic smile. He shrugs a little.

 

“Nothing,” he says. His voice is weak. “Never with you.”

 

The answer angers Kei enough to grip Kageyama’s arm to yank him closer. Kageyama turns to look at him, wearing a face that Kei had never seen before.

 

Kei leans over and their teeth click against each other’s. Kageyama stumbles back; Kei growls and grabs the nape of Kageyama’s neck and licks his tongue across a dry pair of lips. His mouth opens. Kageyama tastes of sour bread and meat sauce.

 

Kageyama does not speak, does not moan. They stumble their way to Kei’s cramped bed, and Kei pins an unresisting Kageyama onto the bed and looks down at the familiar black-haired youth, splayed below him. Older, he is still as beautiful and idiotic as his youth. Kei traces a finger down Kageyama’s cheek. Those eyes suggest nothing.

 

Their lips meet a second time. It is softer, more chaste. Kei forgets to breathe as he nips the familiar body rubbing against him.

 

.

.

.

 

After, Kageyama dresses back again without a word and Kei watches him, curled up in the bed.

 

“My brother used to play volleyball,” he offers. Kageyama does not turn to look at him, but he makes small sound. His fingers that are buttoning down his shirt slows down, and Kei is mesmerized at how long and nimble they are, how they once held a ball between them.

 

“He played since elementary school and he...he was good. There were people who came just to watch him play. I always watched all of his matches until he went to high school. He went to Karasuno and said he became a regular one day. I believed him and watched him improve his tosses and serves. He helped me practice receiving the ball. I thought there was no one better than he was.”

 

Kei says this slowly, choosing the words so that they may offer an impartial account of his past. He is glad for this breach between them, him deceptively comfortable snuggled in bed, while Kageyama stands still, listening to him speak. Kei wets his lips and smoothens over the wrinkled sheets.

 

“Then one day, I decided that I wanted to see him run about in the courts. I didn’t for three years, because he suddenly didn’t want me to come to his matches. Said that he became nervous. But I wanted to cheer for his last game, and I went. He wasn’t in the court; he was standing in the bleachers. He…” Kei’s voice drops into a whisper. “He lied to me.”

 

The tale should have ended there. Kei closes his eyes and does not see Kageyama, is not in Berlin, is not old and lonely enough to cry about his brother. He is thirteen again, watching his brother’s face, a wave of coldness washing over him.

 

“He tried to kill himself.” Kei says.

 

Kei found the bandages and the small cutter knife in the bathroom before Akiteru came back to clean up. His brother did not offer him any explanations and Kei did not ask him questions. They had only exchanged an empty look, a shared confusion—you were not supposed to see this—and Akiteru picked up his knife and threw away the bandages, carefully rolled up, into the trash. Kei crouched on the bathroom floor long after he left. But why? He did not bother to demand. Instead he opened his mouth. Out came a little cry.

 

Kei rubs the sheets under his fingers, over and over again. He wills his voice not to crack. “My brother,” he says, “he loved volleyball. He played again even after he graduated. He still plays.” Here he opens his eyes and looks at Kageyama, who is looking back with him, again with that distant expression. “He loved the sport,” he repeats. He thinks, just like you did.

 

Kageyama nods slowly. He has finished dressing up. He runs a hand over his matted hair and seems to want to ask something. He opens his mouth. “What was his position?”

 

I thought you were about to die, Kei wants to explain. After you woke up, I thought I would have to see you cry. I did not think I could bear to see you waste yourself away and fade. I cannot apologize for something that I was too scared to face a second time. I wanted you to remain as a shining memory inside me instead of a withering disappointment. I wanted to save us. I wanted to save myself.

 

He shoves those words back in. Kageyama is openly honest, does not flinch from the story and also from the unsaid excuse. He does not sneer at the sensitivities and the assumptions Kei made all those years ago and veers the topic to something that interests him. Kei lets out a hopeless chuckle.

 

“He was the wing spiker,” he answers.

Kageyama twitches a small smile. “He was an ace, then,” he says. It is not a question.

 

Kei looks at him. When I see you, I see something that I once loved, then denied, and accepted back again. It was just a blurring pastime, it was merely a club activity. It did not define his position in the future and it did not help him live his life. But Kageyama’s presence presses all those protests back in. He sighs a little.

 

“Come back to bed,” he says, defeated. He spreads out an arm to Kageyama and wills him to take it. “I’ll make you some tea after.”

 

Kageyama takes the hand.

 

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry that all my comment-replying has been so out of date!! I've been busy with real life and writing in Korean and wow it's good to be writing again in English although I feel a bit out of sorts. Thank you for all your lovely comments!


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